


As it was Before, so it will be Again

by theclockiscomplete



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: AU, F/M, Pub AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-15
Updated: 2015-02-15
Packaged: 2018-03-13 03:55:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3366824
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclockiscomplete/pseuds/theclockiscomplete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Whouffaldi AU- It's been six months and Clara still grieves for her boyfriend's death. An encounter with a surly, lonely Scotsman outside the pub will transform the both of them and lend credence to the idea that chance can be as beautiful as it has proven destructive, and that some bonds exist outside the boundaries and suggestions of time.</p>
            </blockquote>





	As it was Before, so it will be Again

**Author's Note:**

> This is an experimental fic in two ways: number one, it's my first attempt at an AU, and number two, it's my first fic that employs a point of view that is something above third person omniscient in that it relies on physical cues far more than providing the characters' thoughts. Inspiration comes from Kelly Clarkson's "Heartbeat Song," though if I tried to explain how it wouldn't make any sense. I would really appreciate feedback if you have a moment, and thanks always for reading. The title is an oblique reference to Clara's echoes--after all, you could read this as within the canon if Clara has died in twelve's timeline.

It was a summer Friday night in a small town. The air was thick and damp enough to create halos around the lights outside the pub. If the people drinking and shouting on the balcony would have looked down, they might have seen the tall, rakish gentleman approaching long before the girl. As it was, their faces were doing their best to leave prints on the bottoms of their mugs, and so the man was completely unnoticed until he stepped into the pool of light surrounding the girl, who started in surprise.

“Evening,” she said, and returned to staring out at the dim street. Strands of her fine brown hair whispered in the grip of a breeze that was not quite refreshing and felt more like a vaguely warm exhalation of street fumes and drinks. The man’s impressive gray eyebrows deepened in response along with the lines in his face, which had the curious quality of indicating neither frowns nor smiles but demanded attention nonetheless, hoarding shadows in their cracks. The tall man brushed past her and into the din beyond. “Charming,” the girl muttered. If she noticed the resulting stutter in his stride, she gave no indication.

It was a summer night in a small town. The crowd on the balcony had expanded in a manner related to the bill and still nobody noticed the girl sitting on the curb and occasionally swiping at her eyes. The man came outside, muttering about noise and young people with a tone that was reminiscent of a toy that says things when its string is pulled. He sat a few feet away from the girl and if either of them noticed the other glancing their way or the question swelling between them like an overfilled balloon, neither said anything until the man set his empty glass beside him, a glass coffin in the bottom of which one may have found his previous inhibitions.

“You shouldn’t be alone out here.” His mouth twisted the shadows on his face into a kaleidoscope of shapes with the formation of every letter, and his Scottish brogue competed with the stifling air for density.

“Not creepy at all,” the woman commented, and her voice echoed the precise kind of fiery spirit that was currently hibernating somewhere far from her hunched figure.

“Jus sayin’.”

“Well don’t. I’ve had it with people sayin’.” The man gave a snort and turned his gaze stubbornly away. If the dog that nosed through the bins in the alley across from the pub were capable of analyzing the grainy, black-and-white scene a few feet away from him, he might have assumed the two humans perched on the curb like a cross owl and a basset hound were old friends having a spat. As it was, he took no interest in them and continued splishing through dingy puddles in search of a picky toddler’s half-eaten dinner.

“What exactly are people saying that you hate so much?” His expressive eyebrows said “I am determined to be offended,” but his gruff voice was decidedly sincere and the girl turned her large brown eyes to him.

“D’you really want to know?”

“I’m asking, aren’t I? Hurry up, nobody’s got time to just…” he waved a long-fingered hand in the light, “…sit an’ wait for you all night.”

The girl bristled. “Well nobody’s got time to gossip with old Scots who can’t handle a bit of noise, but that didn't stop you.” The two glared at each other, and it was at that moment that a taxi swished past them on the wet road and sprayed a neat wave of dirty water over them both. The people on the balcony were whooping and whistling, and one of them yelled “Oi! Wet shirt contest! My vote for the lady!” He thrust his hips against the railing and the girl raised a pair of deuces.

The men laughed harder, and the gray-headed man caught a glimpse of both a stubbornness and a sadness that would be hard pressed to match. He stood and hurled his glass at the men—the sound it made when it shattered against the railing somehow gave the impression that all the other sounds had gotten quieter. They started shouting obscenities at the Scot, and he stood and offered the woman a hand.

“Truce?” he asked. “Better make it quick before they realize they’ve got the upper hand.” A glass smashed several feet to his left as if to punctuate his statement. He flashed the briefest of smiles, and the distance in his sky-glass melted into something that prompted her to take his offered hand before it re-formed and he was hard lines and ice again. They turned the corner and walked until the din of drunk man-children and throbbing bass faded to the general murmur of Friday night in a small town.

Instead of feeling chilled by the water soaking through their clothes, the two felt further stifled, as though an aggregate sum of three days of sweat had suddenly pooled on their bodies. It was a Friday night in a small town, and the air was holding its breath before a storm. They were passing through the local playground when the man stopped and sat on the chipped green carousel and only folded his arms when the girl stared him down, her small hands tucking sodden strands of hair behind her ear.

“What are you doing?”

“Well,” the man started, and her fists clenched at the derision in his voice, which he noticed. Behind him, a lit window darkened as someone prepared for bed. His voice was smugger when he continued. “Unless you’re willing to follow a perfect stranger onto a train and back to his flat for a set of dry clothes, I’ll be following you. And I don’t think I’d feel safe going to a strange girl’s apartment when I don’t even know your name.”

It was warm and damp and the girl looked torn between crying and hitting the man with a kitten heel for a long moment. The she sighed and sat rigidly next to him, fiddling with imaginary wrinkles on her shirt hem. “Clara,” she said in what was arguably the most reluctant use of the letter ‘R’ ever employed.

“Clara,” the man repeated, and if the little boy up past his bedtime had heard him as he leaned out his window to discern stars between the clouds, he might have thought that the wet-haired lady far below him had only just heard the name for the first time. The man’s accent unwrapped each syllable, savoring it like the paper on the last Christmas present. He paid no obvious notice to the way his companion’s fingers ceased their twitching or how her tense shoulders dropped a fraction of an inch, and yet something in the waves between them lessened and evened out. “I’m the Doctor,” the man said. “Pleasure to meet you.”

The girl seemed to be a master at two expressions at once, and now her face suggested a wariness that her eyes refused to acknowledge, choosing rather to side with the banter in her voice. “Right. Doesn’t sound like an alias at all.”

The eyebrows deepened and somewhere on the bruised horizon came the low rumble of thunder. Neither of them moved, even when the stifling damp around them began to shift into something with gravity and settle on their heads and shoulders. “You never said what you were tired of people saying.” Clara dug her toe into the muddy ground stripped clean of grass by years of children scraping their shoes into the earth to slow the spinning.

“I’m sorry,” she said. His face twisted into confusion, giving him the effect of his upper lip reaching for his downturned eyebrows.

“What for?”

“That’s what they’re saying.” She looked up at him and the bags under her eyes were only then apparent. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. It’s that or ‘you need to get out’ or ‘give it time’ and I’m sick of it. Just…sick of it.” Another car _whooshed_ past them on the road wet and puddled from yesterday’s rain (and the day before that and the day before that), but the spray fell short of their perch. The streetlight’s reflection staggered and shuddered before becoming complacent again.

“That doesn’t seem very nice,” the Doctor said. “Gettin’ mad at people for tryin’ to help you. No wonder you’re drinkin’ alone. Why d’they say that inneway?”

It was hot and wet and there was murder in the girl’s face but mostly sadness and fuck them, fuck this crotchety old man and she stood and her eyes blazed at him and there was awe and confusion etched in the lines on his face because she suddenly seemed so _big_ , and her mouth opened and the sticky night rushed towards their spot on planet Earth in the form of a warm wet over which he barely heard “My boyfriend died.” He was on his feet then, and the low and rumbling clouds were witness to the sudden deluge that had them glaring at each other through water masks as his lips twisted to snarl “So did my wife.”

A long, loud moment of rain on swings, on slides, and on shoulders and squelchy, sodden earth, and then her hands were locked in the spaces where his arms bent and his palms pressed into her waist and their rain-slick mouths tasted of water both foreign and domestic and a little like sweet sky and forces of nature. There was lightning in which they broke apart and saw their slice of the world more clearly than ever before and it was her flushed cheeks and his rain-dark hair and eyes that promised each other galaxies across lifetimes.

 

 

Their clothes dried on the radiator in Clara’s apartment and the two lay atop the sheets in a final bid to maximize the surface area on which the air trickling through the open window could cool their fevered skin. The power had winked out just as they’d tumbled onto the bed, but it never got fully dark this close to the city and they could see each other in a filmic kind of black and white—a swell of a breast, the hard line of a shoulder against the dim window. And of course there had been lightning to punctuate her cries and his benedictions murmured into her ear, and none so bright as the one that lit up the room in the final second of their union, when the universe narrowed down to his roar and her nails in his shoulders and the bond between them both natal and existing since before time itself.

Now it was her head on his chest and his long finger tracing praises in another language between her shoulder blades, and the rain kept coming but the thunder was more sullen than aggressive. As they lay there, bare inside and out, their faces wore the expressions of a peace afforded to them by the spirits of those they’d lost.

 

 

He left the next day as they both knew he would, left her with a kiss on her forehead and a final wave and a smile from them both—the first real one either of them had conjured in months. It was a bright, hot Saturday in a small town and for the first time, the sun felt as though it was shining for them instead of at them, and when she turned from the platform and he from the open window, it was with a certainty that this was far from their last meeting. Somehow in its infinity of numbers and emotions and places and thoughts, the universe had witnessed the rejoining of something that had been together since the beginning, and it would not stand for it to remain separate forever.


End file.
